


you are the first and last of your kind (oh, devour me)

by minarchy



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, F/F, Mutual Pining, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 03:51:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6688099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minarchy/pseuds/minarchy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What’s this supposed to be?” Steve is holding the printout that Bucky had replaced her bookmark with. She was wearing at least three sweaters and, judging by the bulge in the front of them, Bucky’s pretty sure that she knows where the big hot water bottle went. “You want to take a trip.”</p><p>Bucky grins at her over the lip of her cup. “Uh huh,” she says. “What d’you think?”</p><p>“It’s a cabin,” Steve says, knocking her glasses accidentally as she scrubs a sleeve across the cold tip of her nose. “In the middle of a forest. In <em>midwinter</em>.”</p><p>“Uh huh,” says Bucky, thoroughly enjoying the disbelieving look on Steve’s face. “It’s a cabin, in the middle of the woods, in midwinter, with <em>working heating</em>, and,” she pauses for effect, “a genuine wood stove.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are the first and last of your kind (oh, devour me)

**Author's Note:**

> this is hideously indulgent. i got blocked two thirds of the way through finally writing that non-powered high school/mafia au that's been rotting in my gdocs since 2012 and that i'd wanted to finish before i went to see cap 3. this is the result of that sulk. i'm so sorry. also, i don't actually know how tenant's insurance works, which i probably should. or american health insurance, actually, so you might have to just roll with it.
> 
> unbeta'd.

 

                              _you are always looking at her._  
_you look at her too much. It is dangerous to look at_  
_people in such fashion. something terrible may happen._  
  
_**— Oscar Wilde, Salome**_

 

Bucky had been the one who had the idea, but it was the boiler’s fault. It had blown because the super didn’t maintain their crapbox of an apartment — Bucky’s ma’s old apartment, God rest her; a pre-war building with pre-war plumbing — and it was December, and it was freezing, and their insurance didn’t cover rehousing costs.

It did, however, award them a payoff to cover living expenses.

“What’s this supposed to be?” Steve is holding the printout that Bucky had replaced her bookmark with. She was wearing at least three sweaters and, judging by the bulge in the front of them, Bucky’s pretty sure that she knows where the big hot water bottle went. “You want to take a trip.”

Bucky grins at her over the lip of her cup. “Uh huh,” she says. “What d’you think?”

“It’s a cabin,” Steve says, knocking her glasses accidentally as she scrubs a sleeve across the cold tip of her nose. “In the middle of a forest. In _midwinter_.”

“Uh huh,” says Bucky, thoroughly enjoying the disbelieving look on Steve’s face. “It’s a cabin, in the middle of the woods, in midwinter, with _working heating_ , and,” she pauses for effect, “a genuine wood stove.”

Steve looks, briefly, like she’s considering it — Bucky has a vision of Steve curled up on the sofa that’s in the pictures posted on the website, wearing Bucky’s sweater and those ugly, giant socks she loves so much, and has to breathe down on the sudden pang of longing that stabs at her chest — before her gaze falls on Bucky, and the wistful expression drops off her face. She fixes Bucky with a suspicious glare; Bucky does her best to look innocent.

“You already booked it, didn’t you.”

“We leave tomorrow?” says Bucky. Steve throws the printout into the air in exasperation. “I already packed for you!” Bucky says.

“When?!”

“Whilst you were asleep,” Bucky admits; Steve had dropped off on the sofa after pulling off her wet work clothes and tugging on everything soft and warm she could lay her hands on. Bucky hadn’t had the heart to wake her, and besides, she needed the opportunity to engineer things to her advantage.

Steve stalks into her bedroom, disappears from view for a moment, and then returns, looking equal parts amused and irritated. Bucky blinks at her, taking an exaggerated slurp from her cup.

“It does sound nice,” says Steve, slowly.

“Hot water,” says Bucky. “Dry clothes. No running commentary from next door about how hard she wants it.” She’s grinning, now. She can see Steve coming around.

“Well,” she says, giving Bucky a look that says she knows exactly what Bucky’s doing, and she’s going to pay for it at an undisclosed later date, “seeing as you’ve already packed.”

 

They leave first thing the next morning, catching a greyhound upstate and then a local bus to the small town that huddles at the edge of the forest. The plan had been to catch a cab from there, but when they arrived it turned out that the nearest cab company was based two towns over, and they’d either have to wait for one to wade through the slush covering the roads, or check in the garage to see if they can rent a car.

It turns out the garage doesn’t like to rent out cars in winter, due to ‘stupid city folk who don’t know how to drive’ pitching them off the road; but for five hundred dollars down they can take an ancient pickup with them. If they can’t return it in working order, for whatever reason, it’ll be another five hundred; otherwise they can drop it off before they leave.

Seeing as they don’t really have any other option, and the cold in leaching the colour from Steve’s face with every passing minute, Bucky hands over the cash. 

“It’s not like we’re the ones paying for it,” she says as they chuck their suitcases in the backseat.

“We’ll probably need a car at some point,” Steve adds, “especially if we run out of food.”

 

“How are we going to run out of food,” Bucky says, as they haul what feels like most of the produce from the general store into the pickup.

“I’ve seen how much you eat,” Steve says.

“That’s only so I get my fair share after you inhaled it all,” Bucky says. Steve throws a handful of snow at her.

 

The house actually looks just like the picture on the website, something that Bucky hadn’t been expecting. It doesn’t seem like anyone has been in it all season, however, and they spend the first half-hour of their Escape From The Deep Freeze (Steve even has a hashtag for it on instagram, and spent most of the trip up there taking photos of the scenery through the fogging windows of the greyhound and reaction shots of her and Bucky to the other passengers) stomping around the rear of the house, trying to power up the generator.

“Let there be light,” Steve says, when they finally get it to clunk and churn into life, and the yellow glow of the kitchen lights spill out onto the snow-covered clearing separating the house from the surrounding trees.

“ _Finally_ ,” says Bucky, blowing into her cupped palms. “God, I need a shower.”

“Well,” says Steve. “I didn’t want to say anything.” Colour is splashed across her cheekbones and the tip of her nose, there is snow in her hair, and her eyes are very bright. Bucky wants to kiss her, quite desperately. She pushes her into a snow drift instead, and runs inside the house, laughing at Steve’s cursing behind her.

 

Whilst Bucky is in the shower — Steve can hear her singing even over the clanking of the pipes, loud and complaining as hot water floods them for the first time since, probably, the first snows of winter fell — Steve cheats some chilli. They have beef and garlic and onions, and Steve stirs in a carton of tomatoes and a can of kidney beans, dices some peppers, chucks in chilli powder and paprika and cumin. The hearty, rich scent of the food rises from the hob and spreads throughout in the kitchen and living area, overriding the musty smell of a house unloved and unlived in.

After what was probably at least half an hour, Bucky finally pads back downstairs. Her hair is hanging around her face in damp twists, her skin pink from the heat of the water. She walks into the kitchen nose-first, exaggeratingly sniffing the air; at the sight of the food bubbling happily on the stove, her face splits into a grin. Steve hides her own expression behind rummaging for bowls and rinsing them out in the sink, afraid that it will give too much away.

“Make yourself useful,” Steve says, whacking Bucky on the back of the hand with the ladle when Bucky tries to steal a spoon of chilli from the pot. “Go light the fire, will you?”

“What makes you think I know how to light a fire?” 

“I don’t know. Google it.”

She can hear Bucky muttering to herself as she ladles out heaping bowls of food, and smiles.

 

“Nnngh,” says Bucky, flopping backwards into the dense cushions of the couch. Steve, used to the pornographic noises that Bucky makes when she’s eating, merely glances at her. “Fuck, I love your chilli, but I swear it’ll kill me one day.”

“I’ll add it to the list,” says Steve, rescuing Bucky’s bowl before it slips off her knee onto the floor.

“Never know when you’re gonna need an escape plan,” Bucky agrees, drowsily. The fire is crackling merrily in the stove, throwing heat out wide around the room. Steve stretches her legs out onto the coffee table, basking in the warmth.

“Admit it,” says Bucky. Her eyes are closed, her face relaxed and smiling. Her voice is slurring at the edges, smudged with tiredness.

“What,” says Steve. She is very warm for the first time in days; she feels like she is glowing with it like the logs in the fire. She can feel herself slipping beyond the threshold of waking and into the welcome embrace of sleep.

“This was a _great_ idea.”

“Law of averages allows for the occasional success,” Steve says, or thinks she says, before she, too, is asleep.

 

They wake up several hours later, stiff from sleeping in uncomfortable positions propped against the couch. Before eating, Bucky had turned off all of the lights apart from the lamp next to the sofa (“we don’t know how much oil we have for the generator; besides, the fire’ll give us plenty of light to see by”). The fire has burned down to embers, smouldering in the bottom of the stove, throwing a deep red glow onto the rug.

The house feels different in the dark; the hairs on the back of Steve’s neck prickle, and she suppresses a shiver, despite the warm still infusing the room. A glance at Bucky shows that she is as unnerved by this new atmosphere as Steve is. They stick close together as they tamp down the fire so it won’t throw out a spark and catch the rug; they hover around the couch, unwilling to move out of the small circle of light that the lamp casts.

“I’m not sleeping on the couch,” says Steve, needing to fill the silence, wincing at the way her voice sounds overloud in the quiet of the house. And it is very quiet, the snow deadening any of the normal forest sounds that Steve would expect to hear. The silence, coupled with the darkness, gives the house a claustrophobic feel; Steve fights the fear that rises, compulsively, within her. She is not afraid of the dark.

“Yeah,” says Bucky, her voice unsteady, her gaze fixed on the shadowy form of the staircase, barely visible in the gloom. She drags her eyes away to look at Steve, and makes an attempt at a grin. “Your old bones won’t take that kind of treatment.”

“Watch it, whippersnapper,” Steve says, “these old bones can still take you down.”

Bucky laughs. It falls hollow against the shadows that lie between them and the stairs. 

Steve takes a deep, fortifying breath, and switches off the light. “Come on,” she says, taking Bucky’s hand and pretending to herself it’s just so they don’t fall over anything on their way to the bedrooms. 

The darkness is oppressive; Steve doesn’t know where the wall switch for the light on the landing upstairs is, so they navigate their way up blindly. She considers, and immediately dismisses, using the torch on her phone to light their way; the image that the idea conjures of them following the single beam of light, the shadows gathering around them, sends a shoot of ice up her spine. No; better to walk through the darkness with their night vision to guide them, than blind themselves to everything outside of the column of light.

Being partially-colour blind — some of the cones in her eyes don't work properly so she doesn’t see the full spectrum — means that Steve can see better in the dark than Bucky can, provided she has her glasses. She finds a door on the second floor that can only lead into a bedroom; wrapping her hand around the doorknob, she feels a sudden flare of urgency, the idea that someone or some _thing_ is coming up behind them, creeping up the stairs in their wake, reaching out long, claw-like fingers to brush down her nape.

Bucky’s hand tightens around hers, quick and strong, and she presses in close behind Steve, like she feels the same sudden shock of fear that Steve does. Steve’s hand is suddenly damp with sweat, and she can’t get enough grip to twist the handle, the burn between her skin and the brass as she struggles to release the latch spreading against her palm — and then the door clicks open, swings inwards, and they’re practically falling in after it, Steve’s free hand groping the wall for a switch as Bucky grabs the door frame and pushes it closed behind them.

The light clicks on, finally, revealing a simple, unthreatening bedroom: one double metal bed with the duvet and pillows folded and piled at the end of the mattress, a cupboard against one all, a chest of drawers against the other. There are a pair of bedside tables with pull-string lamps, and Bucky releases Steve’s palm to walk over and switch them on, as well.

With the curtains open and the lights on, there is no view through the glass; they look like black holes in the wall, and Steve quickly draws the curtains against their flat, strange stare.

Bucky has clearly claimed this room for herself; her case is on the floor at the foot of the bed. She sees Steve looking at it, and her face becomes something guilty, although Steve can’t tell why.

“I put yours in the other one across the hall,” she says. “But, uh,” she pauses, “maybe we should—”

“We haven’t had a chance to heat the whole house,” Steve says, as an agreement to Bucky’s unspoken suggestion that they should stay in the same room tonight — this room, to be specific, because neither of them wanted to go back out into that dark hallway, and whatever it was that lurked out there.

“Yeah,” says Bucky, looking relieved. “You can sleep in my things, if you like.”

 

They’ve shared a bed before; Bucky’s known Steve her whole life, and children think nothing of casual intimacy. Even when she finally realised what that gravitational draw to Steve meant, when she realised that Steve was it, for her, even if the feeling would never be reciprocated, it had never been awkward between them, the constant sharing of space. There is a Steve-shaped hole in her personal space.

It is good, now, to be sharing the bed with her, even with Steve wearing Bucky’s clothes and curled up next to her. It’s one of those scenarios that has featured in many of Bucky’s more pg fantasies, and is often the beginning of some of her more r-rated ones; but now, after whatever that was on the landing, Steve’s closeness is a comfort and a balm to her frayed nerves.

 _You’re just tired_ , she tells herself. _You’ve been travelling all day, and you fell asleep on the couch, and you grew up in the city. That’s all. There’s nothing to be afraid of._

Even so, they don’t turn off the lights.

 

When the morning comes, or when Bucky wakes, because they aren’t necessarily the same thing, she finds herself tucked under Steve’s arm with her face pressed into the seam of her borrowed jumper where the chest meets the shoulder; not quite in Steve’s armpit, but where the smooth space of skin would be above her breast and below her collarbone. Steve’s arm is draped over Bucky’s back, hand loose in sleep against her ribs. She smells sleep-warm and detergent-fresh, with the lower scent of dust and sweat from being burrowed under the covers. Steve hadn’t showered the night before, she remembers. Bucky thinks, if she breathes deep enough, she could probably smell the snow and pine on her, and the stale, tobacco-flavoured air of the greyhound below that. 

She burrows deeper into Steve’s embrace, warm in the cocoon of the bedding, and closes her eyes.

 

When she wakes the second time, it’s because her stomach and her bladder are complaining at her. It must be late morning, or even early afternoon, but the light level in the bedroom is still the same as it was when they fell asleep, light harsh by the electric bulbs they left on all night, burning through the generator oil.

Bucky slips out from beneath the covers, careful not to wake Steve — not that she needed to have worried; Steve had always slept like the dead — and switches off the ceiling light. There isn’t any light leaking through the curtains, and they aren’t heavy enough weave to be considered blackout. She’s struck with the sudden, absurd fear that it’s still night outside, that it will always be night outside, that the long dark has come and the sun will never be there to warm the earth; but when she draws the curtains, she discovers the actual cause, and laughs at herself, relieved.

“Buck?” Steve’s voice is slurred, warm and sleep-rich, and something flutters in the pit of Bucky’s stomach. “Watcha doing?”

“The windows’ve got shutters on them,” she says, feeling silly for her panicking earlier. Steve looks confused. “‘S why it’s so dark.”

Bucky opens the windows, feeling the cold bubble of air trapped between the glass and the wood as she fumbles with the iron latch and pushes the shutters open. The freezing winter air rushes in, grabbing at Bucky with eager, pinching fingers; she closes the windows again quickly, smirking at Steve’s complaining grumble and burrowing deeper into the covers.

“Come on, sleeping beauty,” she says, grabbing the bottom of the duvet and tugging it away for Steve’s grasping fingers. “Up and at ‘em.”

Steve rolls onto her stomach, hitches her legs up under herself, and gives Bucky the finger over her shoulder. Laughing, Bucky grabs for Steve’s feet, narrowly avoids getting kicked in the face when Steve shrieks at the cold press of Bucky’s fingers on the bare skin of her ankles.

“Fuck off!” she says, kicking out, but she’s laughing, her blonde hair falling into her face. “Get the fuck _off_ me, you fucking jerk, I’m going to _kill_ you, Barnes.”

Bucky grabs Steve’s calves, tugs her down the bed until Bucky is mostly on top of her, so they’re face to face. She can feel Steve’s panting breaths on her face. “Gotta catch me first,” she says, grinning, and then is up and running out of the room, hearing Steve swearing and laughing, scrabbling up from the bed and charging out after her.

 

They spend the day with the fire roaring in the stove, heating the house through, exploring it. It’s Bucky who finds the charm; it looks like a thick piece of shiny coal, or obsidian, or twisted up in old, died bryony flowers.

“Hey, Steve, come and look at this.”

She reaches up a hand to pull the charm down, but Steve, appearing from where she’s been poking through a cupboard that appears to hold nothing other than broken china and unpaired shoes, grabs her wrist before she can touch it. Bucky looks at her in askance.

“My nana used to tell me about this stuff,” she says, staring at the charm, a line furrowing between her eyebrows. “That’s some sort of gemstone — and bryony’s meant to make a protective stone stronger.”

“Protective stone?”

“A ward, from the old country. She was the kind of person who nailed horseshoes above doorways and put betony under our pillows to stop demons getting us while we slept.”

“Your nana was hardcore,” Bucky says, remembering. Mrs Rogers the senior had been a tiny Irish woman with iron-grey hair that she always wore, whenever Bucky had seen her, twisted back behind her head. She had been hard as nails, with a wicked sense of humour and the old Catholic fear of God attitude, and Bucky, whose own grandparents had died before she was born, had taken that as the epitome of what a grandmother was supposed to be. When she’d found soft and cuddly grandmothers in storybooks, she’d felt somewhat disappointed. Mrs Rogers was the kind of woman you could imagine facing down a dragon, or a headmaster.

“Mm-hmm,” says Steve, still examining the charm. “I wonder why this is here.”

“What is it?” Bucky asks. “I mean, why would it be here?”

Steve bites her lip. “I don’t know. If it’s obsidian, then that’s — general protection, I think; but it might be tourmaline.” She squints at it, adjusting her glasses as though she’ll be able to determine the kind of rock it was merely by looking; and Steve has no geological experience or interest.

“What would that mean?” Bucky says. She has never given the idea of charms or protection stones any real thought, and as such has never put any great stock in it, but she can’t shake the tightening feeling in her chest, a feeling of anticipation, and of the sickening curl of dread.

Steve looks sideways at Bucky when she answers, her face a mixture of genuine concern and confused disbelief. “I read a book, once,” she says, as though trying to delay and verify her words to Bucky, who might be thinking that Steve is harbouring some hysterical or ridiculous beliefs in witchcraft — although Bucky knows Steve as well as she knows herself, and would never doubt the solid founding of Steve’s clarity of mind, “for one of Strange’s classes. It was about using stones for protection.”

“And?” Bucky presses, even though she doesn’t really, honestly, want to know the answer. She’s stuck with the sudden idea that ignorance of whatever is going on in this house, or whatever the previous occupant believed was going on in this house, will protect them from it. As though, by denying its existence, it will not be real. But she’s knows that is a childish attitude, and she knows better.

“Black tourmaline is used for protection against evil spirits,” Steve says, sounding as reluctant to voice the notion as Bucky is to hear it, “who mean to do harm.”

And Bucky remembers the sharp feeling of scrutiny pickling at her back last night as they went upstairs to bed, the sensation that something horrible and ancient and hungry was stalking them through the darkness, and is afraid.

The electronic shutter sound of Steve’s phone startles her as Steve takes a photo of the charm. “We should see if there are any more of these around the house,” she says.

“You think that Dr Strange’ll be interested in them?”

“He might be. And he might be able to tell us more about what they are.”

 _Never know when you’re going to need an escape plan_ , Bucky thinks, something her father drilled into her the moment he considered her old enough to understand the fact that the world was a threat, especially to a girl. She thinks about the pickup parked outside, and remembers that she left the keys carelessly strewn on the coffee table, and resolves to always keep them on her from now on. There is something odd about the house, something dark and strange that sparks an instinct in the ancient part of her brain that must have kept her ancestors alive, back when there were beasts that hunted the early humans after the sun had set. She is alive today because they listened to that instinct, plucking at the base of her spine and the nape of her neck, and had bolted before they could be caught and devoured.

“Alright,” she says, “where d’you want to start?”

 

Steve had pretty much forgotten about the book on folklore and practical magical protection until Bucky had found the charm; she’d taken the class with Strange in her second year to meet a credit requirement. It had been interesting, and the doctor (“PhD”, he’d said, “not MD, so please, no one overdose on energy drinks because I will have to leave you to die;” it had been a seven am lecture, and it had roused a guilty laugh from his students) had been an engaging teacher, but she’d never thought she would actually _need_ the information one day. Except, now she feels like she really does need it, and the more they root through the various nooks and crannies of the cabin the more of it that comes back.

In their search of the house, they find a cupboard filled with dried plants in jars and tied in bunches with string — whoever used to live there had clearly been an avid botanist, even if the plants weren’t there for a darker purpose, because there is a striking variety in the collection of plants that, Steve is sure, can’t come merely from the immediate surrounding woodland, and every jar and bundle is neatly labeled with a strip of paper in a thin, spidery hand. They discover more charms like the first, and a celtic shield on the door of the stove that could just be there for decoration, and a lot of single shoes tucked into odd places. There’s something that looks like the remnants of a thorny bramble branch that, once upon a time, been twisted into a wreath, but now only a lonely, bent piece remains above the doorframe.

Bucky, when she’s knows what she’s looking for, has a far better eye for spotting these things that Steve does; she is taller, and doesn’t need the hefty prescription that Steve relies on to see. Steve finds herself watching Bucky stretch up on tip-toe to peer on top of cabinets and into cracks in the walls, just as much as she looks for more evidence of folk magic. Bucky’s dark hair is pulled back behind her head in a low ponytail, and strands of it keep getting caught on unplaned wooden surfaces below countertops or inside cupboards, falling haphazardly around and into her face. She is much stronger and more flexible that Steve, who catches herself openly staring when Bucky bends and twists to look into a crack between the floor and a loose skirting board, gaze caught on the long strip of bare skin that is revealed at Bucky’s lower back.

She has seen Bucky in far less clothing before, and often, because Bucky is as shameless about her body as Steve is shy about hers; but it isn’t the same as the tantalising glimpses that peek out at her from behind the layers that Bucky is wearing. 

Most disturbingly, to Steve’s mind, they find what looks to be runes or symbols drawn in chalk and charcoal, hidden beneath carpets and behind doors and under their beds. It’s not the drawings themselves that Steve finds so disconcerting; it’s that the lines that were so carefully drawn have been smudged against all recognition, as though someone has tried to rub them out.

 

They find the cat when they come downstairs, called away from their troubling findings by the complaints of their stomachs. It is large and slender and healthy looking, a handsome cat with a thick coat of glossy chocolate fur. It is watching them from its perch on the sofa.

“Did the house always have a cat?” Steve asks Bucky, her voice low. She feels, rather than sees, Bucky’s shrug.

“Fucked if I know,” she says. “It wasn’t here earlier; how the hell did it get in?”

The cat blinks at them, slowly, with large brown eyes.

“Maybe it belongs to the owner?” Steve hazards.

“Maybe,” says Bucky, unconvinced. “See if its got a collar.”

It does; a thick band of leather with the word ‘Margaret’ inlaid in an elegant, looping script. The collar is edged around with some sort of intricate pattern that Steve can’t quite make out, along with an intertwining leaf pattern.

“What kind of name is Margaret for a cat?” says Bucky. “And why does it keep staring at me like that?”

“Maybe you offended it,” says Steve, smirking; she holds out a hand to the cat, who sniffs at it almost disdainfully, in that way that cats have, and permits Steve to pet it. “I think Margaret’s a lovely name,” she says to it. The cat purrs under her fingers, and Bucky stomps away, muttering about suck ups, into the kitchen to fix what is ostensibly lunch, despite the grandmother clock showing the time as four in the afternoon.

 

“Where d’you think it came from?” Bucky asks, when they’re halfway through the pile of peanut butter sandwiches that she made whilst Steve was examining their new arrival. The cat — Margaret — has claimed Bucky’s lap as its preferred place to snooze, abandoning Steve and forcing Bucky to hold her plate at chest height to avoid claws digging ruthlessly into her thighs. “It can’t’ve just _appeared_ , and I haven’t seen a cat flap anywhere.”

Steve, highly amused by Bucky’s obvious discomfort from having to hold her plate aloft for the duration of the meal, just shrugs. “I dunno,” she says. “But it seems perfectly at home.”

“It’s a cat,” says Bucky, drily. “That’s kind of what they do.”

They had rescued a cat, once, when they had been children; a ratty, skinny little stray kitten, malnourished and sickly and swarming with fleas. They had hidden it in Steve’s bedroom for days until Steve’s mother had found it, feeding it scraps from the table and cleaning its sores with antibacterial soap stolen from the bathroom. Mrs Rogers had been understandably ill-impressed with the girls — it could have diseases, she insisted, and God only knows what its fleas have gotten into — but she’d allowed them to keep it, provided that they were willing to sacrifice their allowance to take care of it.

The kitten had reminded Bucky, even then, of Steve, with its bones sticking out through matted and patchy fur; it had trusted them almost immediately, which was strange for a stray (Mrs Rogers had thought that someone had probably abandoned it reasonably recently, a comment that had caused Steve to bundle the kitten up in her arms and kiss it, telling the cat in that serious way that children have that they was going to take care of it, now), and developed an undeniable bravery in its curious exploration of Steve’s bedroom. Bucky had thought privately that the bravery was bordering on stupidity, because it would frequently climb inside cupboards to investigate their contents and yowl plaintively when it got stuck.

It had died just before they graduated high school. They had caught the underground over to the Bronx and buried it, surreptitiously, in the rose gardens.

“Do you know it’s got something to do with, you know,” Bucky waves a hand, uncomfortably. Steve gnaws on the inside of her cheek. The same thought had occurred to her, sitting with the cat as they ate their food; had the cat appeared because of the thing that had terrified them both last night, either as a reaction to it or (Steve feels a little silly thinking it) as an abettor? Or, more mundanely, had it recognised the signs of habitation in the cabin and simply come in to get away from the cold? But in whatever case, there is still the pressing matter of how it got into the cabin in the first place; Bucky was right, earlier, they hadn’t seen any cat flaps in their search of the house, and they hadn’t left any windows open.

“I guess that depends,” she says, after a moment, “whether we’re thinking that there’s something, well, odd happening here.”

Bucky’s expression does something strange that Steve can’t quite catch. She looks away from Steve down at the cat, nestled comfortably in her lap. “I guess it can’t do any harm letting it stay,” she says. “It’ll probably just come back in whatever way it did the first time if we tried to kick it out.”

The cat purrs against her stomach.

 

“Do you think you’d be able to recreate them?” Bucky says, after they peer again at the smeared and faded outline of the chalk drawing under the mat in front of the door. Steve shakes her head.

“I don’t know what they’re supposed to look like,” she says. “And there isn’t enough of the lines left here for me to even take a decent guess; I’d probably end up making them do the opposite of whatever it is that they’re supposed to do if I tried.”

“Any nuggets of wisdom from old Strangey?” Steve had emailed the pictures that they’d taken to her old teacher after lunch; she hadn’t told him about the happenings of the night before, only that she and Bucky had found them in the house they were staying in for the Christmas period.

She checks her phone; no new emails beyond the usual mailing list spam that littered her inbox. “Nothing yet,” she says, trying not to sound disappointed. The sun had set, finally and completely, soon after she had sent the email. The heavy shadows thrown by the trees surrounding the house had suffocated what little twilight they could have expected, making the house feel utterly isolated. She is quietly dreading the night ahead. “Maybe he’s on holiday, or something.”

Bucky makes a noncommittal noise. She’s toying with the collar around Margaret’s neck, rubbing her fingers across the engraved name, over and over. Steve recognises it as her habit of fiddling with things when she’s anxious, and doesn’t comment. 

They’re sitting together on the sofa; the house doesn’t have a television, and they’ve been spending the afternoon idly chatting about nothing in particular to distract themselves from thinking about what had happened yesterday. She’s just about to ask what Bucky wants to have for dinner, when the bulb in the lamp next to them suddenly pops, and goes out. The rest of the lights go out as well, throwing the whole house into sudden darkness, interrupted only by the light from the fire that they’ve kept burning in the stove.

The cat stands abruptly in Bucky’s lap, forelegs braced on her thigh and back legs on the sofa, pressing against Steve’s knee, hissing into the blackness. Steve looks at Bucky, feeling suddenly cold and sees that Bucky’s face has gone very white. 

“Must have blown a fuse,” she says, trying to keep her voice level and unaffected. Steve feels, for some reason, that if they pretend that everything is normal, it will somehow keep the dread thing that she is certain is lurking just outside the reach of the firelight at bay.

“Probably,” Bucky says, in a similar tone. “Guess we’ve been running the generator too hard. It hasn’t had a work out all winter.”

“How about an early night, then?”

Steve doesn’t really want to leave the safety of the fire, but she knows that she won’t be able to sleep downstairs even if they’d wanted too; it feels oddly exposed in the living room, the house open through into the kitchen. She wants to put doors between her and the darkness, to hunker down beneath a blanket with Bucky, the childlike notion that a layer of fabric will keep them safe.

“Sounds like a plan,” says Bucky, who, Steve is sure, is doing far better at this false bravado than she is. “I brought that hurricane lamp over with me that we found in the pantry; it still has fuel in it,” and she slides off the sofa with barely noticeable reluctance, and goes over to the fire to light a taper.

The flame inside the lantern burns bright and steady, the glass throwing diffused light out against Bucky’s face and catching in the loose strands of her hair. Bucky makes a show of walking steadily back towards Steve, lantern held out at waist height, and extends a hand down to her. “Might I escort you to your room, ma’am,” she says, aiming for teasing and mostly succeeding; Steve smiles at her and it feels almost unforced on her face, and slides her palm into Bucky’s.

“Come along, Madge,” Bucky says to the cat, who gives her an utterly unimpressed look at Steve scoops it against her shoulder.

“I don’t think she likes Madge,” Steve says, walking close enough behind Bucky to worry, absently, about stepping on her heels. 

“Well, they can’t’ve called her _Margaret_ all the time,” Bucky says, as they mount the stairs. “Imagine shouting Margaret into the garden when its food is out, it’s ridiculous.”

“What about Maggie?” Steve tries, and gets a shoulder full of claws in response. “ _Ouch_ , shit, okay, maybe not.”

Bucky giggles, and it falls hollow outside their little circle of light as they reach the landing. When Steve steps off the stairs, the floor feels cold even through her socks, cold and somehow wet, the sensation seeping through the thick knitted fabric and onto her feet; she stares at Bucky, who has half-turned to look at her, face blank in what Steve can only feel must be terror, and then Bucky isn’t looking at Steve any more, but is looking over her shoulder at the darkness behind her, and the lantern in her hand is shaking, making the light around them shudder and jerk.

Steve feels something like breath on the back of her neck, but it’s cold where breath should be warm; cold and clammy against her skin, and she’s sure there is something horrible behind her, something waiting in the dark, something standing right at her back—

Claws rip into her shoulder and stomach and forearm; the cat is snarling and hissing over her shoulder, its claws extended into Steve’s clothes and skin as it spits ferociously into the darkness, loud and painful against Steve’s ear. The noise seems to break both of them free of their terror-bound stillness, and they dart forwards, crashing into the door of Bucky’s bedroom next to the stairs; Bucky is ripping at the handle, wrenching it open with the lantern hanging from her wrist, thumping heavily into the wood, and then she’s falling through, tugging Steve after her, her arms full of furious cat still howling behind her. Steve slams the door behind her, and the cat quiets abruptly, her fur still standing all on end and claws still latched into Steve’s flesh.

Bucky tries to speak, and has to swallow before any real sound comes out. “There are candles,” she says, “in the dresser.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, her voice shaking, the taste of fear still thick and coppery in her mouth. She lets go of Bucky’s hand, and pulls Margaret off her. “Down we go,” she says, and tamps down on a hysterical laugh. Her hands are shaking as she digs in the drawers for the candles; they are thick and heavy, wax cool and solid against her palms. She brings as many as she can carry over to Bucky, standing with the storm lantern at the foot of the bed, looking like she’s fighting back nausea.

Between them, they manage to light all of the candles, placing them on the tables and the dresser and all around the bed, throwing light out into the room. The curtains are drawn, and the shutters behind them open, but Steve doesn’t want to open the windows to close them; she tugs the fabric closed and tucks it onto the windowsill to create a pocket against the cool air of the night.

Bucky is shaking when Steve joins her in the bed. She doesn’t feel like she’s doing much better; her hands are trembling fitfully as she pulls the covers up over them and tugs Bucky in close to her. The feel of another living body close, even though they are both as frightened as each other, is a balm that Steve can’t deny herself. They wrap their arms around each other, lying face to face. The cat curls herself up in the hollow above the bedspread created by their bodies, and watches the door with eyes dancing in the candlelight.

 

By unspoken agreement, they don’t talk about what happened in the morning. Steve wants to know what it was that Bucky saw behind her on the landing, but she doesn’t want to make Bucky relive the experience, especially with them both visibly shaking, even in the light of day.

The house is paid for the duration, and their apartment is still an icebox, but Steve doesn’t want to spend another night there, with whatever it is that lurks in the shadows. She doesn’t say anything to Bucky, because she feels on edge enough as it is, and she doesn’t want to spook her, but Bucky wrenches open the door to the clearing whilst Steve is making breakfast, and stomps out to the car. She hears Bucky swear, loud and furious, from out of sight of the kitchen; Steve abandons the porridge she was watching on the cooker and goes outside to look for her.

“You’ve got to be _fucking—fuck_!” Bucky is spitting with rage and fear-laden desperation from the clearing, and it only takes a moment for Steve to see why: it had snowed heavily overnight, and the road back down to the town is impassable by anything other than a heavy duty four-by-four, and all they have is a clapped out truck. If they tried to make it back out of the forest in that, they would end up ditched or stranded in the woods, with no outdoor gear and no real notion of how long it would take to walk back to the town, and probably with night drawing in.

“ _Jesus fucking Christ_!” Bucky kicks at the wheel of the truck, practically apoplectic; Steve dashes over to her and grabs her hands before she starts tugging fistful of hair from her head. She stares at Steve, her face blotchy with cold and anger. “I’m not staying in this _fucking house_ ,” she snaps, wrenching at Steve’s grip; Steve hangs on, doggedly, because she knows when Bucky gets like this she’ll do herself more damage than anything she can get her fists into.

“I don’t see us as having much of a choice, Buck,” she says, trying to keep her voice level. 

“It’s trying to keep us here,” Bucky says, her voice a hiss, her face very close to Steve’s, now. “It doesn’t want us to leave.”

“And it’s done a pretty good job of it,” Steve says, darkly. “But I’m pretty sure it’s not the car’s fault.”

The fight drains out of Bucky, then, and she looks rueful and slightly abashed. “Sorry,” she says, lowly. “It’s my fault we’re here — we should’ve just stayed in Brooklyn, Sam would’ve let us camp out on his sofa—”

“Shut up,” Steve says, firmly. “We wouldn’t’ve lasted a week at Sam’s; you know how he gets about mess.”

Bucky huffs a laugh, breath warm against Steve’s face, close enough to kiss. “It’s all your mess, you slob,” she says.

“Sam lives in Harlem,” Steve says. “You know how you hate Harlem.”

“I don’t hate Harlem,” Bucky says, allowing Steve to guide her back inside. “I just don’t get why anyone would willingly choose to live there.”

“Hey,” says Steve, “at least it’s not Jersey.”

 

Steve isn’t sure how they manage to pass the rest of that day. Bucky fitfully cleans everything she can find, filling the house with the chemical smell of bleach as she empties the cupboards to scrub inside them; Steve, having given up on trying to stop Bucky on her neurotic rampage against the house, takes poking at the bookshelves, trying to find something distracting enough to read. There is a small, battered book with the title ‘A Children’s Guide to Patron Saints’ on the spine in faded blue letters. The dustjacket is torn and yellowed with age, the spine broken, and several pages slip loose under her questing fingers, but Steve is a sucker for the stories of how knights became folk legends, and the sanitised versions of the stories listed in books like these often only deal with the heroics, and not the brutality of their martyrdom.

The cat sits on the back of the sofa and watches Bucky scrub at the kitchen, her gaze unwavering and unblinking. When Steve notices this, she twists in her seat to follow Margaret’s gaze, in case Bucky has passed out from inhaling the cleaning fumes; but Bucky is fine, and when Steve tracks the cat’s eyes to see specifically where she is focussed on, she realises that Margaret is staring just over Bucky’s shoulder. Steve can’t see anything there. She looks back at Margaret, to check that she is looking in the right place, and finds the cat’s face turned full towards her. It startles her, and she fumbles her page; Margaret looks at her for a beat longer, before slowly turning her head back towards Bucky.

 

They go upstairs early, both of them unwilling to face another dark trip through the house after the sun goes down, and play poker for candy sitting cross-legged on the bed. Bucky, Steve is sure, is somehow cheating, because at one point she has four aces in her hand, and Steve has a fifth in hers. When she accuses her, Bucky plays aggressively offended, and Steve has no choice but to kick her off the bed. Bucky retaliates, laughing, by grabbing the pillows and hitting Steve full in the face with one; they battle, shrieking and giggling, until Steve trips Bucky and sits on her stomach, deaf to Bucky’s whines of how boney her butt is.

When they slide beneath the sheets to sleep, they are as relaxed as they were when they first arrived and fell asleep on the couch; Steve relishes in the sense of normality that the evening has produced, and refuses to let her mind turn towards the darkness that presses outside the closed door.

 

It’s dark in the bedroom when Bucky opens her eyes; the candles have burned out around them (they hadn’t been able to find the blown fuse at the generator, and hadn’t commented on it further for the rest of the day) and the air feels cool and still on her skin. She is standing at the foot of the bed, facing the door. She doesn’t remember getting out of bed.

She hasn’t wandered in her sleep since she was a child — she remembers her mother calling it ‘wandering’ because sleepwalking didn’t seem the right fit when Bucky got up in the night and left her body behind. She turns, already preparing to lie down and will herself back inside herself, and see an old man sitting on the bed, next to her head. Steve is lying next to her body, breathing slow and deep, her hair draped across her face and onto Bucky’s shoulder, where her face is pressed. She doesn’t seem disturbed by the man in the room with them, and Bucky knows, with a sudden sickening clarity, that that’s because she’s the only one that can see him. That he is only _here_ , in the place where Bucky is. 

Margaret is nowhere to be seen; Bucky is sure that the cat would know that the man is there, would be kicking up a racket, waking Steve and then Steve would wake Bucky — except Bucky wouldn’t wake. Bucky wouldn’t wake because she’s not in her body, and the old man is stroking her hair now and whispering in her ear, and Bucky jerks forward to clamber back inside herself.

The old man looks up at her from where he’s bent over her head. His eyes are black, flat, like a shark’s, like a dead things; his skin, in the night of the room, is sallow and wrinkled, his hair thick and grey on his head. His fingers, where they stroke her hair off her forehead, are long and thin and talon-like. His teeth, when he smiles at her, are stained, and pointed. Bucky freezes, fear locking her in place as she stares back into the merciless eyes of the old man, or the thing that looks like an old man. His smile widens, splitting his face, showing all of his teeth, long rows of dark, sharp knives in his mouth.

He raises one hand, deliberately, theatrically; he extends one long finger, the nail cruel and broken, and presses it, hard, into the skin of Bucky’s left shoulder.

Pain blooms across the void between Bucky’s body and herself standing at the end of the bed, pain that makes her cry out and clutch at her arm, pain that breaks the fear spell that has kept her motionless whilst the old man whispers to her; Bucky dives forward, desperate to reclaim her body and get away from this spirit that oozes malevolence like a festering wound.

She is face to face with herself, when her body opens her eyes, and smiles at her. Bucky cries out in shock and horrified fear, and then again in pain as the old man sinks his pointed fingers into her hair, tugging so sharply on her scalp that if she’d had a body she’s sure she would be bleeding. The old man’s breath is fetid and cold against her cheek as he bends down and puts his mouth against her ear.

“Got you now.”

 

Bucky seems much more herself the next morning, laughing at Steve and bustling around the gleaming kitchen making coffee. Steve is confused, but it’s a good feeling; Bucky is happy and seems to have got over her fear of the cabin, and that puts Steve at ease more than anything else could. 

Margaret seems to have disappeared. Steve looked all over the house for her, and eventually asked Bucky if she knew where the cat had gone. Bucky had shrugged, unconcerned.

“It’s a cat, Steve,” she’d said, “It’ll come back when it’s hungry, or it’s gone home. It doesn’t matter.”

It takes a while before Steve notices anything off about Bucky’s behaviour. She hadn’t been properly comfortable in the house since that first night, and now she seems — content doesn’t quite feel like the right word in Steve’s mind; it’s almost as though Bucky fits here, in this strange house in the middle of the forest trapped in the middle of winter. Like she belongs here. But Steve has known Bucky for her whole life; they grew up together in the city, and Bucky is anything but someone who is happy for long stretches outside the range of a wifi network. 

Steve gives herself a mental shake; she’s just on edge after the events of the past few days, that’s all. She’s imagining strangeness where there isn’t any, and there’s plenty of strangeness to go around here. There’s nothing wrong with Bucky. Everything is fine.

 

In this place, a sidestep out of reality, all the colours are muted, like Bucky is looking at the world through grey-tinted sunglasses. The old man has gone, disappearing as soon as he released his vice-like grip on Bucky’s hair; she had looked for him, running out of the house and into the clearing, but the world was black and empty beyond that, where the forest would be, and she was afraid to go in there. 

The thing in her body laughs at her, playing house with Steve like it knows — but how can it know? Bucky is still here, she still has her mind, she’s just missing her body. She tries to warn Steve, tries to smash bowls and mirrors, tries to do something, _anything_ , to get Steve’s attention, but nothing works. She follows Steve as she hunts for the cat, watches hopelessly as Steve talks and laughs with the thing that isn’t her, and how can Steve not know? How can she be so oblivious to the absence of Bucky in that shell that is walking around the cabin? Bucky would know, if it were the other way around. Bucky would know that it wasn’t Steve inside her body.

She can’t stay inside the house and watch Steve blindly accept a stranger in her body like nothing has changed. She goes outside.

In this other place, Bucky doesn’t feel the cold. The snow is thick on the ground around the cabin and she is barefoot, but it doesn’t seem to matter. She had forgotten about the wandering, before she saw the old man sitting beside her body — but she didn’t want to think about him. He scared her, the way that she had been scared as a child, an all-encompassing fear that turned her bowels to water and her hands shake. Bucky knows, somewhere deep down, that if she thinks of him, he will come. She doesn’t want to know what will happen when he does.

The cat walks towards her out of the empty space where the forest should be. Bucky stares at her. 

“Well,” says the cat. “This is quite the mess you’ve made, isn’t it.”

 

Bucky is laughing, but there is something _wrong_ about it. Steve can’t quite figure it out, but there is something wrong with Bucky’s eyes that puts her teeth on edge. It’s like there isn’t anything behind them. It’s not that the laughter doesn’t reach her eyes, it does, for all intents and purposes it seems perfectly genuine, but.

Sometimes she catches sight of Bucky’s face out of the corner of her eye, and the expressions look almost cruel.

 

“What the fuck,” says Bucky. “You can talk?”

The cat gives him what Bucky can only describe as an arch look, if only cats were capable of such facial expressions. She flicks the tip of her tail where it’s curled around her feet.

“No, wait,” says Bucky, “how are you — _here_?”

“Cats,” says the cat, “walk the fine line between the planes of reality. In many cultures, cats patrol the border between the living world, and that which comes after.”

 _Half in, half out_ , thinks Bucky. What she says is, “is that where I am now? In, you know, that which comes after?”

The cat’s expression doesn’t change, because it is, after all, a cat; but she tilts her head at Bucky, and Bucky gets the sense of sympathy.

“No,” says the cat. “This is the place in between. And you shouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know.” The cat’s gaze is steady and unblinking. It unnerves Bucky. “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you. When you came here as a child.”

“I,” Bucky says, and then “yes.” Because she had forgotten. It had been wilful, the way an adult forgets a child’s dreams, or their imaginary friends. Somewhere along the line, Bucky had grown out of stepping outside of her body when she was sleeping, and walking abroad amidst the things that lingered in between life and death. It had scared her, she remembers. That was why she forgot.

Or, not entirely why she forgot. She remembers, hazily, telling Steve’s grandmother about the things that followed her home after she went wandering.

“Did Steve’s nana do something to me?” she asks. “To make me — stop. To make me forget I could?”

“To you?” says the cat. “No. _For_ you, now, that’s another thing entirely.”

“Please,” says Bucky. “Please, I’m having the worst week of my life; something’s in my body, and I’m talking to a fucking _cat_ , for Christ's sake, and.” She chokes. “And Steve doesn’t seem to realise it’s not me.”

“Well then,” says the cat. “You’ll just have to make her.”

 

There is something wrong with Steve’s hearing aid; it keeps bursting with crackling static, quiet and irregular, but often enough to be irritating. She hopes that it isn’t dying on her — hearing aids are expensive, and she can’t afford to replace them until she’s met her deductible. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches Bucky watching her as she fiddles with the amplifier behind her ear, trying to cut out the static. When she isn’t looking directly at her, Bucky’s face seems sharper, somehow; almost less human.

“I’m going for a shower,” she announces, giving up on tuning out the static and standing up.

“Okay,” says Bucky. She smiles at Steve. Is she using more teeth than usual. “See you in a bit.”

Steve removes her hearing aid in the bathroom and examines it, thinking that maybe there is something stuck in it that’s interfering with the signal; but she can’t see anything. The shower is hot and the pressure, whilst nothing to write home about, is strong enough to flatten her hair against her scalp and sluice the soap from her skin.

When she steps out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, and fumbles her glasses on, she almost falls backwards into the tub. There is writing on the mirror, where a finger has trailed through the steam fogging the glass. Hands shaking, she wipes the fog from her glasses. 

_IT’S NOT ME_

 

The cat stays outside; Bucky had been reluctant to go back into the house by herself, but the cat had insisted. 

“The spirit in your body will be able to see me,” she’d said, “the same way it can see you. If I enter on this side, it will know that you have assistance.”

“And that’s bad?” asked Bucky. She was proud at how little her voice shook.

“That’s bad,” confirmed the cat.

 

Steve had wiped down the mirror in feverish, jerky motions, clearing off the evidence of the words that had been there. She stares at herself, sees the pinched, scared look on her face, and tries to smooth out her expression. She dresses, and opens the door.

Bucky is waiting on the other side. She’s still smiling. Steve would never have thought, before this, that she’d ever think of Bucky’s smile as sinister.

“How’s that generator working out for you?” she says.

“Great,” says Steve, the brightness in her voice sounding fake in her own ears. “I, uh, I think I’m going to go to bed.”

“Good idea,” says Bucky. “It’s been a _long_ couple of days.”

It’s the first time that Steve has heard Bucky mention the events that have happened since they arrived at the cabin all day. Hearing her speak of them now, Steve doesn’t get the same impression from Bucky’s words that she would have done if they had been talking yesterday. It’s as though Bucky is talking about a hard few days at work, or on a physically exhausting trip. Not at all as though they had been experiencing something that had terrified her, not twenty four hours ago.

“Okay,” says Steve, opening the door to the bedroom that Bucky had allocated to her for the first time. “Night, then.”

“Night!” Bucky says, brightly, standing alone in the hallway. “Sleep well.”

It takes her a long time to fall asleep.

 

“Wake up!” a voice hisses in her face. There is a pressure on her chest. Steve opens her eyes, and stares around the room. Margaret is standing on her chest, staring at her. 

“We don’t have much time,” Margaret says. “The hour is almost up; when you refused to wake, I was concerned that They had done something to you.” Steve hears the capitalisation. It sends a thrill of fear up her spine. But she couldn’t actually be awake, surely; she is talking to a cat, after all. This must be a dream.

“This is not a dream,” says the cat, impatiently. “You must listen to me, and you must remember in the morning. The thing that looks like your friend _is not your friend_.”

“What?” says Steve, bewildered. “Are you talking about Bucky?”

“ _That_ ,” says the cat, “is not Bucky.”

“Then,” says Steve, scrabbling upright and upsetting Margaret’s balance, “where is she? What’s happened to her?”

“Something else is inhabiting her body,” the cat says. “You have to trap it, and make it sleep, or your friend will be lost. Do you understand?”

“I,” says Steve, “ _no_. No, I don’t understand. How is something else inside Bucky’s body? How am I supposed to trap it? How am I supposed to make it sleep? Isn’t she sleeping right no—”

A floorboard creaks outside the bedroom door, and Steve freezes. Margaret puts her forepaws on Steve’s chest, so the cat’s face is very close to hers.

“Our time is up,” she says, and her voice is very urgent. “Remember what you have learned. And remember, it must not know that you know.”

 

Steve wakes up to the watery winter sunlight streaming through a gap in the curtains onto her pillow. She is sure that she closed them the night before. Then, she remembers her dream about the cat.

 

The thing that is not Bucky is already in the kitchen when Steve comes downstairs. Steve has spent the better part of the morning sitting on the bed with the covers wrapped around her, trying to come to terms with what is happening, and trying to remember what she learned in Dr Strange’s class about trapping and banishing spirits.

“Mornin’, sleepy head,” says the thing that is not Bucky, smiling at her. Steve remembers what Margaret told her, and fakes a yawn.

“Morning, Buck,” she says. “Good sleep?”

“The best,” says the thing that is not Bucky.

Steve makes a show of rummaging through the cabinets for food, slipping the items she needs into her sleeve and then into her pocket when the thing that is not Bucky isn’t looking. That part is hard, because the thing that is not Bucky seems to always be looking at her. It feels invasive, and innately threatening. Steve swallows hard before she turns around, and smiles.

“Already eaten?” she says.

“Yeah,” says the thing that is not Bucky. “I was thinking of checking out the forest; you wanna come?”

“Nah,” says Steve, trying to keep her voice normal through the tightness in her chest. “I think I’m just going to hang out here.” The thing that is not Bucky is looking at her, and it’s gaze sharpens. Steve waves a hand at her chest. “I’m feeling a little,” and she doesn’t have to fake the strain in her voice, “you know. Asthma-y.”

“Okay,” says the thing that is not Bucky. “I’ll see you in a bit, then.”

“Sure,” says Steve, smiling at it. “Have fun!”

As soon as she sees it off into the trees, Steve dashes over towards the cupboard with all the dried plants. She thinks she knows what she has to do; she just hopes that she’s remembered everything right. The thing leaving the house is a Godsend, because Steve hadn’t been able to figure out how she would get everything together without it realising what she was doing; she grabs the jar labelled ‘St John’s wort’ and almost drops it, her fingers sweaty and trembling. 

She’s almost done when Margaret comes streaking past her; Steve looks up and sees the thing that isn’t Bucky appear through the trees, walking steadily towards the cabin, as though the snow on the ground is no obstacle. She bites down on the sudden, choking rush off fear. She has done all she can. There is tea steeping on the countertop, the cumin and salt circle is ready, the St John’s wort is in one pocket and the garlic in the other.

 _Please_ , she thinks, praying for the first time since her mother had been dying. _Please_.

“Hey, Buck,” she says, as the thing that is not Bucky steps inside the cabin. “I’ve just made some tea; you want some?”

“Sounds great,” says the thing that is not Bucky, smiling at her. There really are too many teeth, Steve thinks. She holds out the cup, and doesn’t flinch when their hands touch.

“Good walk?” she says, trying to wander casually towards the fire. 

“Lovely,” says the thing that is not Bucky, sipping at the steaming tea. “Everything was so quiet; you really should’ve come.”

“Well, you know me,” says Steve, forcing a laugh. Her hearing aid is playing static again, consistent and insistent in her ear. It almost sounds like words. “These lungs are forever fucking up our plans.”

The thing that is not Bucky drains the tea, seemingly unaffected by its scalding temperature; it puts the cup down, carefully, and walks towards Steve. “I wouldn’t say that,” it says. “I got to spend all those days inside with you, didn’t I?”

Steve’s voice chokes in her throat. It sounds so much like Bucky, but she knows it isn't. She knows Bucky wouldn’t say anything like that. She tries not to shake as the thing that is not Bucky steps inside her personal space, cups Bucky’s hands around her jaw. “I could never regret getting to spend time with you,” it murmurs in Bucky’s voice, lowering Bucky’s face towards hers. Steve drops the St John’s wort into the fire as their lips touch, and then flinches away when the static burst in her ear, loud to the point of pain; it sounded, briefly, like Bucky’s voice screaming her name.

The thing that is not Bucky stares at her. It’s eyes are cold, now. Steve grabs at its wrists and shoves with all her strength, forcing the thing that is not Bucky stumbling backwards into the couch — and into the salt circle.

“What,” it says, “have you done, little girl.”

The powerful fumes of the St John’s wort roll out of the fire behind Steve, stinging her eyes and nose as the thing that is not Bucky tries to step towards her and finds its way blocked. It looks at Steve, furious, and then blinks heavily. Steve sees it sway as the valerian kicks in, and bears her own teeth in a smile that is not a smile.

“Fuck you,” she says, as the thing that is not Bucky falls backwards onto the couch, and slips to the floor.

 

“ _Now_ ,” hisses the cat, and Bucky makes a dive for her body, thinking of life and warmth and Steve, thinking of Steve kissing the thing that was in her body, feeling the anger rip through her of how the thing stole that from her that she had always wanted; and then she is sitting upright on the floor of the cabin, feeling more hungover than after a long night of drinking with Sam and Nat, blinking up at Steve.

“Buck?” Steve says. Her voice is shaking.

“Heya, punk,” says Bucky, and Steve starts to cry.

 

They spend the rest of the afternoon throwing their things into suitcases; Steve had made Bucky step over the salt line before she threw herself onto her, wrapping her arms around Bucky’s neck and hugging her, fiercely. Bucky hugs her back, gripping tight to the fabric of Steve’s sweater and pressing her face into her neck, breathing the smell of her deep into her lungs.

“We’re getting out of here,” Steve says, her voice wet against Bucky’s hair.

“ _Yes_ ,” Bucky says, but they don’t let go for a long time.

Now, Margaret is dancing around their feet as they dash around the house, and the sun has long gone down behind the trees before they’ve finally got everything back into the pickup and are ready to leave.

“Fuck the snow,” Bucky says, gunning the engine and heading out into the drifts. She feels terrible, her head throbbing and her tongue like a dead animal in her mouth, but Steve is sitting next to her, and she has her body back; and when they get back to Brooklyn she’s going to tell Steve that she loves her, consequences be damned, because Steve had kissed the thing in her body back, for a moment, and Bucky has to know.

They drive for what feels like hours, the snow making their progress slow going and the lack of light making it hard to tell whether they’re clearing the tree line. They drive in silence, Bucky sweating in concentration at the wheel, Steve tight jawed next to her, Margaret clasped securely in her lap. 

But finally, _finally_ , they see an end to the trees, and open space beyond. Bucky’s shout of relieved laughter turns into a cry of despair and hopeless rage when they emerge from the trees, and see the cabin in front of them.

“We,” says Steve, desperately, “we must have got turned around somewhere.”

“Where the fuck would we have got turned around,” Bucky snarls, knuckles white on the steering wheel. “We drove straight the whole _fucking_ way.”

“He doesn’t want you to leave,” says Margaret, from Steve’s lap. They both look at the cat, startled and scared. She looks back at them, serene with her large, dark eyes. “It’s the witching hour,” she says. “He is strongest, now. He is coming.”

A great thorn limb, knotted and gnarled with spines easily two inches long, slams through the windshield. Steve is screaming, Bucky is screaming; Steve drops Margaret and lunges for Bucky, but the limb has grabbed hold of her and is dragging her through the shattered windscreen and out into the woods. It happens so fast, Steve barely has time to call Bucky’s name before she’s gone, and the forest is quiet again.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she screams, sobbing great heaving breaths. “ _Fuck_!”

“Come on,” says Margaret. “There isn’t much time.”

The cat jumps out of the truck through the gaping hole in the front; Steve wrenches open the door and stumbles out after her, blindly following her back into the cabin. Once inside, she stands in the middle of the room, and stares blankly around. She feels numb. Bucky is gone, and she had just saved her, and they were so happy; and now, Bucky is gone. There is nothing left.

Sharp claws dig into her calf, and break her from her reverie.

“None of that,” Margaret says. “We don’t have time for your wallowing.”

“What am I supposed to do,” Steve says, hollowly. “She’s — she’s gone. I don’t, I don’t know how to find her.”

“None of that,” Margaret says, again. “You’ll need something iron to protect you from the things that he has in his power; something warded would be best, but we’ll have to make do.”

“Iron?” says Steve, trying to focus her mind. “Where the fuck am I—” Her gaze falls on the stove. The fire has long since burned out, but the stove itself is cast iron, and the door on the front is only held in place by hinge bolts. Somehow, she doesn’t know how, exactly, she manages to lever the door free. The handles on the inside are wide enough for her to slip her arm through, and the door itself, whilst weighty, is not beyond her strength.

“A shield,” says Margaret, sounding musing and amused. 

“It has a celtic shield on it,” Steve says. “Will it do?”

“It’s perfect,” says Margaret. “You’ll need a knife, too, or something sharp and silver.”

“There’s a letter opener in the dresser,” Steve says. “I saw it before, when we were looking for charms.”

“Good,” says Margaret, as Steve retrieves it. “And the last thing.” She fishes in the tray below the fire with one dainty paw, and hooks something out attached to a leather strap. It’s a small gemstone, the strap threaded through a natural borehole near the top. Margaret flicks it from her claw to land at Steve’s feet. “Labradorite,” she says. “Hang it around your neck.”

Steve supposes, absently, that she must look utterly ridiculous: a small, skinny girl with a stove door on one arm and a letter opener clutched in the other, with a blue stone hanging about her neck over her coat, walking towards the looming forest with a cat at her heels. 

“Will you come with me,” she asks, as they stand on the edge of the trees.

“Of course,” says the cat. “But I won’t be able to help you, when the time comes.”

Steve nods, jerkily, and bends to allow Margaret to climb up onto her shoulders. She takes a deep, fortifying breath, feeling the icy air sting at her lungs, and steps into the trees.

 

“Do you remember what I told you?” says the old man. Bucky is lying on the snow, her arm bleeding from the thorn spines; she can feel it growing in her veins, the earth reaching inside her and taking root. She nods, because she does remember now, lying here in the snow, what the old man had whispered in her ear while she watched.

“You come to me, in the dark hour, after your body has been prepared; and you will be my perfect soldier, and winter shall walk with us.”

She doesn’t know what it means, but she doesn’t think it matters, now. She can feel the vines in her lungs, pushing up and out against her skin.

“Please,” she says, choking the words out against the suffocation. The old man looks down at her. “Don’t hurt Steve. Let her go. You have me, now.”

“Oh, little soldier,” says the man, his voice soft and crooning, “for that favour, I will want your heart. Will you give it to me, in exchange for this child’s life?” Bucky nods, desperately. Anything, anything to protect Steve. “You will never be able to leave,” says the man. “You will have to stay here, with me, forever.”

“Yes,” says Bucky, “I give it to you. I give you my heart.”

The man makes a noise like a sigh, and it sounds like wind through empty branches. His fingers press against Bucky’s sternum; she closes her eyes against the tears that are freezing on her cheeks, and thinks of Steve for the last time.

 

The snow isn’t as deep under the trees as it is in the clearing, but it’s still deep enough to come past Steve’s knees as she wades through it. She can feel her blood flow slowing, the circulation to her feet failing, but she doesn’t care. All she can think of is Bucky, and finding Bucky, because the cat had told her she could, despite everything, still save her.

Ahead, a tree has fallen sideways into its neighbour, and they have grown together, forming a bower covered in snow.

“That is the entrance into his realm,” Margaret says. “I’d warn you to guard your heart, but I don’t think that’s going to be a concern.”

Steve doesn’t have the energy to ask that she means. Her lungs ache; her whole body aches, with the cold and the exertion, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the mission. She is going to save Bucky. She walks beneath the bower, and nothing changes.

Except, there is movement out of the corner of her eye; something is slinking towards her, just out of sight.

“Do not stop,” whispers Margaret in her ear. “Face what comes at you, and do not leave the path.”

What path, Steve wants to ask, but there is a path, isn’t there, twisting away through the trees. The sound of the thing that is stalking them does not stop, and neither does Steve, dragging her failing body through the snow, tightening her grip on the door and the letter opener.

A flurry of movement to her left, and then an explosion of snow as a gigantic hawthorn, littered with the skeletons of animals fallen prey to its thorns, charges at her across the path. Steve braces, raising the shield to counter the striking branches; and the limbs flinch away from the iron, the hawthorn giving off a shriek of pain. Tiredness forgotten, Steve sets her face in a snarl and hefts the letter opener, which has become so much more in her hand: it is a sword, long and bright in the strange light of the forest, the weight of it comforting in her grip. She thrusts out, slashing and hacking at the spiny limbs that flail out at her, threatening to shred her. 

The hawthorn falls back against her onslaught, curling its limbs in against itself to make itself a stronger, harder target; Steve doesn’t care, she knows it can’t win against her. She strikes again and again, hitting it with the door that has become a shield on her arm, stabbing it with the sword, thrusting and punching until the hideous thing falls away off the path and slithers back into the forest.

Steve is panting, her breath sending great plumes of steam out into the night sky. She is exultant, and she is focused. She walks on.

 

“Why are there not more of these things?” says Steve, kicking mass of rotting flesh and twine that had, until a moment ago, been an animated thing, off the path.

“Getting cocky, are we?” says Margaret, from her shoulder. 

“I don’t _want_ there to be more of them,” Steve snaps. Her sword drips black fluid on to the snow. “I just don’t understand why there _aren’t_.”

“The stone protects you,” Margaret says, but she doesn’t sound certain. Steve can feel her moving on her shoulders, looking around them into the depth of the trees.

“That’s not it,” says Steve.

“No,” says Margaret. She sounds worried. Steve tries to ignore it, and presses on.

 

She finds Bucky beneath a tree, lying in the snow. Whoever the ‘He’ is that Margaret was talking about is not there. Bucky is alone in the cold, with flowers blooming bloody through her skin, clematis and daphne mixing their sweet scents with the bitter tang of Bucky’s blood.

“Steve,” says Bucky, her face trying to smile. Steve drops to her knees next to her, abandoning the sword and shield and taking Bucky in her arms. “Are you going to kill me?”

“No, Bucky,” Steve says, smiling back at her. Her vision blurs as tears well, and slip down her cheeks. “I’m going to take care of you.”

“I can’t come back with you,” Bucky says. “I gave him my heart.”

“That’s okay,” says Steve, stroking Bucky’s hair back from her face. “You can have mine.”

The look on Bucky’s face is broken open and she looks utterly lost, staring up at Steve with wide eyes. “I can’t give mine back,” she says. 

“I know,” says Steve. “That’s why it’s called unconditional love.” And she leans down, and kisses Bucky, whose lips are very cold against hers. The blue stone hangs between them, resting against Bucky’s chest. “Remember who you are,” Steve breathes against Bucky’s mouth. “Come back to me, Buck.”

Bucky’s fingers twitch, new blood pumping through her veins; she lifts her hand, slowly and jerkily, and touches the tears on Steve’s face, her expression full of devastated wonder.

“ _Steve_ ,” she says.

**Author's Note:**

> TRUE LOVE'S KISS
> 
> i might write an epilogue; this was hammered out in two days before i could run out of steam, which i have now officially done. can u tell.


End file.
